There have been so many lobbies I get in to that are set to a specific map and the Geth as enemies. It makes me sad.

Random / Random ftw!

Why would you set Geth... I HATE pyros. Although I figured out a good strat for them with my Turian Soldier. Spam Concussive shot to knock them back / stop the flamethrower, and then pewpew them with the Phaeston.

Because in terms of high level enemy threats, the Geth have one, the Prime. Which, if you take cover, is very slow, and easy to take down. As opposed to Brutes, Ravagers, and Banshees, or Phantoms, Atlas', Engineers/Turrets, Nemesis. Yeah, the Geth have Pyros and Hunters, but if you play conservatively, there's no reason a Pyro should get close to you unless you have an objective that locks you in a tight spot, in which case, if you see a big group coming, you abandon the spot until it's safe to return. And the Hunters, won't attack until they're right in your face, so long as you spot them coming, easy to take down as well.

Not to mention that with Geth, the counter grab and smash presents itself more often, so even in those situations, it rarely becomes a real problem.

Yup, I normally run around as a Krogran Sentinel on Silver, and if against Geth I'll try to aggro the Pyros and hide behind cover. When they walk up flaming the world, I just melee/pull them from behind the cover. Extremely satisfying and effective!

Lol, yes they do. I actually soloed my vanguard against cerberus, made the targets, even the hacking stuff without any problem, until I get two atlasas in wave 10 and one of them did a OHK attack. So much for medigel when you are soloing.

personally I'm fond of the ol cloak -> energy drain -> rapid headshots with the Valiant method for my Salarian infiltrator. Pyros are almost as annoying as Hunters.

Havent gotten the salarian infiltrator, but that class is one where lvl 6 on claok might be worth the "extra ability" instead of extra sniper damage. Energy drain ftw.

Not unless you're CQC. If you're sniping, drain and fire. The damage bonus lasts like 1.5s after breaking cloak so both will get the bonus. The short cloak cooldown will also reset your energy drain faster. If you ARE CQC, I like having it up with a max damage prox mine so you can be a ninja and prox mine things without dropping your cloak.

Lol, yes they do. I actually soloed my vanguard against cerberus, made the targets, even the hacking stuff without any problem, until I get two atlasas in wave 10 and one of them did a OHK attack. So much for medigel when you are soloing.

Pro tip: As soon as you shoot while cloaked, hit a power button, or vice versa. Both can be done if you do both quickly enough (before you fully uncloak) with the added bonus that casting the power cancels out the cloak's cooldown and uses that power's cooldown instead. This works really well with the SI.

It depends on whether you're using a single-shot or multiple-shot rifle.

With the Valiant and extra power, you can pop e-drain and get off all three shots with the damage bonus instead of just two. It may be possible to do e-drain and get all three shots without extra power while cloaked, but I didn't get it to happen often enough.

Whether that extra damage boost for the third shot is worth it over the recharge time is a personal choice.

When I'm using something like a Black Widow or the regular Widow, where there's no way you're going to fight the recoil and get all three off, then the cooldown is better. But I put those on my human infiltrators for Cryo + shot anyway.

Reapers just need to be worth more XP/credits. Bioware can stop pretending all 3 factions are equal threats.

This. If a gold reaper mission is 100k, It is worth the extra 15 minutes a gold fight with them can be. Otherwise, I'll continue to cheese and fight the geth on my terms to unlock more weaponry for the inevitable balance changes.

I would guess that they will just buff the geth, rather than increase our credits or decrease the reaper difficulty.

Also, does anyone know the formula by which the weapon stats are increased from I-X? Is it by weapon, weapon class (i.e. pistol vs shotgun) or completely independent (like 2% each upgrade regardless of weapon for example).

Um, unless they make the geth immune to grab, My Dakka team will still drop them in under 30 minutes on firebase white.

Reapers just need to be worth more XP/credits. Bioware can stop pretending all 3 factions are equal threats.

This. If a gold reaper mission is 100k, It is worth the extra 15 minutes a gold fight with them can be. Otherwise, I'll continue to cheese and fight the geth on my terms to unlock more weaponry for the inevitable balance changes.

I would guess that they will just buff the geth, rather than increase our credits or decrease the reaper difficulty.

Also, does anyone know the formula by which the weapon stats are increased from I-X? Is it by weapon, weapon class (i.e. pistol vs shotgun) or completely independent (like 2% each upgrade regardless of weapon for example).

Um, unless they make the geth immune to grab, My Dakka team will still drop them in under 30 minutes on firebase white.

Yup, this. I just hope when the inevitable Nerfageddon occurs with the next patch/balance they don't murder the Decoy skill.

The problem with just buffing Geth or Cerberus is that the units themselves being made tougher won't fundamentally alter Reaper superiority. The Reaper faction has better combined-arms units than either other faction, though Geth do pretty well with cloaked Hunters/pyros for close quarters and rockets/primes for range.

But a Ravager locking you up at range while a Banshee teleports close and Cannibals toss frags and Marauders use their unfortunately effective rifles? Or a Brute charging you? They have the mix of tough, must-focus-fire targets which get in close rapidly and effective long range fire support. No other faction matches. Geth do OK but Reapers are flat out better at it.

If they want to 'balance' the factions they're going to have to introduce new units (for Geth) and make Cerberus Nemesis snipers actually valid threats instead of "vague annoyances which overwork my shield generator."

In fact, if they buff geth, they are simply making grab tactics more viable.

This is actually a good point that I did not think of. So it seems like Bioware should add grenades to the regular geth arsenal, forcing players to come out of cover. Or change their dipshit ai. Either way, that seems like it would require a patch and not a rebalance.

I desperately to be able to, as host, boot people even when the others won't VTK. Level 4 soldier with a N7 rating of 4 does not belong anywhere near a Silver match. AND he didn't move from spawn at all. Also, add kick in match to boot AFK players.

As for B, if you are talking about the ammo box grenade respawns, they revealed in a bug discussion that grenades in ammo boxes should be on a 20 second respawn and ammo clips on 3 seconds. I say should, because there are apparently a couple of boxes that aren't, specifically in the 'reactor' level, the evac area ammo box has ammo on a 20 second respawn, which is how this all came out. Also, some maps' boxes give you 2 grenades (FB White) while others (Tuchanka) only give 1 per box.

As for B, if you are talking about the ammo box grenade respawns, they revealed in a bug discussion that grenades in ammo boxes should be on a 20 second respawn and ammo clips on 3 seconds. I say should, because there are apparently a couple of boxes that aren't, specifically in the 'reactor' level, the evac area ammo box has ammo on a 20 second respawn, which is how this all came out. Also, some maps' boxes give you 2 grenades (FB White) while others (Tuchanka) only give 1 per box.

Ammo and grenades are controlled in Coalesced, as well as disabling enemy ammo drops. I'm fine with limiting my reload, my real issue with this is that it's team-wide. It pretty much screws just the Soldier as he is the only class entirely dependent on raw firepower. Below are the stat overrides for Silver. Any variable that ends in 'f' is a multiplier against the base values, some of which do not appear to be defined in Coalesced and may be hard coded. In ME2 (guessing ME3 works the same), removing the 'f' and defining a straight value range would override it for whatever subcategory you were modifying.

Man, must have done like 7 or 8 Gold Geth runs last night. It was a public game, but the teams were solid. When you put in the search modifier for Geth, Gold, Firebase White (or Ghost), you pretty much know the game you find has something specific in mind.

Wait... so grenade reloading is based on how much the team is using the ammo box, not how often *you* are using your grenades?

The ammo box spawns a grenade 20s after the previous one has been taken, modulo bugs. I believe they should give grenade classes a free one every round. The grenade amount is fine in Bronze but painfully restricted in silver/gold and the increased power from grenade abilities does NOT make up for it. My primary use for ammo reloads is refilling grenades.

Those otherwise mostly-useless thermal clip packs you have 200 of will restore all your grenades, for what it's worth. When you REALLY need one, there you go.

e: I agree with Grayrest, basically, in all particulars. Grenade classes should get +1 at the end of every round. You get extra ammo ("thermal clips") at the end of every round, it'd make the same amount of sense.

Those otherwise mostly-useless thermal clip packs you have 200 of will restore all your grenades, for what it's worth. When you REALLY need one, there you go.

e: I agree with Grayrest, basically, in all particulars. Grenade classes should get +1 at the end of every round. You get extra ammo ("thermal clips") at the end of every round, it'd make the same amount of sense.

And that's precisely why I don't have 200 of them I use them usually in W10,W11 when getting ammo is just not going to work, or if I need to spam some damage right now and am out of rockets. Also, the fact that they stagger most enemies means I can create a little working space when we're getting swarmed.

Those otherwise mostly-useless thermal clip packs you have 200 of will restore all your grenades, for what it's worth. When you REALLY need one, there you go.

e: I agree with Grayrest, basically, in all particulars. Grenade classes should get +1 at the end of every round. You get extra ammo ("thermal clips") at the end of every round, it'd make the same amount of sense.

*handwavey justification*"thermal clips" between rounds is because you have time for everything to literaly cool down. It's not that more clips magically appeared, it's just that things cooled down so you effectively have more clips.

...but that doesn't explain why you can be out of thermal clips for one weapon and still have them for the other weapon when they're supposed to be universal.